Competitive Suffering

Posted by on Jul 10, 2013 in Articles, Featured, Human Rights, Korea | 0 comments I was nearly at the end of a presentation on the North Korean prison camp system, when the last person in the audience grasped the microphone to ask a question. His question was so unexpected that I was literally blindsided. Up to that point, I’d already described the conditions inside North Korea’s prison camps as “odious” and “systematic,” which qualified them as a crime against...
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Serbia’s Future: Back to the Past?

Posted by on Nov 14, 2012 in Articles, Blog, Eastern Europe, Europe, Featured, Human Rights, Uncategorized | 6 comments The war in Yugoslavia began as a conflict over state structure. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, the nationalist movements in the republics championed greater autonomy only to be suppressed in turn by Tito, who then went on to incorporate many of their demands in the 1974 Yugoslav constitution. In 1989, Slobodan Milosevic signaled his intentions to assert Serbian dominance within the federation...
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Reading Del Ponte in Croatia

Posted by on Oct 17, 2012 in Articles, Blog, Eastern Europe, Featured, Human Rights | 1 comment Carla del Ponte’s memoir of her time as the chief prosecutor of the two major international tribunals – on Yugoslavia and Rwanda – is basically a tedious book. It can be summed up in a single sentence: she fought tooth and nail against stubborn national leaders, indifferent UN bureaucrats, and elusive war criminals, and although they all put up their “rubber wall” (muro di gomma), she...
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The Limits of Information in North Korea

Posted by on Jul 3, 2012 in Articles, Featured, Human Rights, Korea | 0 comments If North Koreans simply knew more about the world outside – or received more accurate information about their own society – they would transform their country. This is an operating assumption behind much of the policy thinking in Washington and Seoul. Both governments pour money into radio stations that beam information into North Korea. Civil society activists, perhaps impatient with the...
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Assad and His Droogs

Posted by on Jun 27, 2012 in Articles, Featured, Human Rights | 0 comments Alex has a big problem. Since his earliest years he has been addicted to a potent combination of sex and violence. When he hangs out with his friends, their favorite activity is to break into people’s houses and terrorize them. But that’s actually not Alex’s big problem. That comes later, when he’s apprehended by the state and subjected to an extreme form of aversion therapy that makes...
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Debating Syria

Posted by on Apr 24, 2012 in Articles, Featured, Human Rights, US Foreign Policy | 0 comments It’s easy to dismiss diplomacy as feckless. The art of negotiation always appears amateurish until it manages, against all expectation, to succeed. Even then, an agreement is only as good as its longevity. The February 29 pact between the United States and North Korea, the result of painstaking negotiations, lasted all of 12 minutes after Pyongyang decided to launch a satellitethat eventually...
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